Repressible Conflict?

In 1858 William H. Seward minted a round, shiny phrase. He described the difference between Northern wage labor and Southern slave labor as an "irrepressible conflict." Later, Seward's friends explained that he had not meant that war was inevitable, much" less that it was desirable. Abraham Lincoln profoundly believed that war was undesirable, and hoped that it was avoidable, when he came into the Presidency and put Seward in his Cabinet. But Seward's phrase had caught on. Hotheads on both sides used it. By the time the shooting started, civil war was indeed "irrepressible."

Last week the possibility of World War III was more & more in the horrified world's public eye. That there were those who looked upon war between the democratic, capitalist U.S. and authoritarian, Communist Russia as "inevitable" was no longer news. The news was the extraordinary number of spokesmen in both countries who, admitting the profound differences between them, insisted that war was repressible.

A Suspicion? A Guess? Henry Wallace, of course, found nothing "irreconcilable in our aims and purposes. Those who so proclaim are wittingly or unwittingly looking for war, and that, in my opinion, is criminal." Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish told a radio audience: "The basis for the suspicion [toward Russia] is nothing more substantial than suspicion."

Radiorator Raymond Swing pointed out the difficulties of organizing a world with only two--or at the most three--great powers, then said: "A phrase is going the rounds that there can be no lasting cooperation between two systems so fundamentally different as the Russian system and our own. It is stated solemnly as a cosmic law. But so far it is only a guess. No intellectually honest man can say it is more. What experience we have points the other way. We got along with Imperial Russia. . . ."

The Foreign Policy Association's Vera Micheles Dean, returning from San Francisco, reflected: "The most disquieting development at the conference was the tendency to believe that a conflict between the United States and Russia is becoming inevitable. . . . There is no fundamental reason why the two countries should not find a workable basis for postwar cooperation."

Fourteen Yale faculty members wrote the New York Times that knowledge and better understanding in both nations would keep the peace. Conservative Columnist David Lawrence wrote: "Despite outer appearances . . . there are reasons for believing that the unity of the two countries . . . has not been disturbed and will not be. In the next few months [U.S.Russian relations] will tend to clarify and undergo substantial improvement."

A group of Congressmen started a campaign of frankness to improve relations with Russia. They asked Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew: "Has the United States, through some tacit understanding, or through day-to-day working relations, become . . . part of an Anglo-American front against the Soviet Union?" Grew said no, adding that there was no part of the world where U.S. and Russian interests were in basic conflict.

President Truman was known to be worried about relations with Russia. Harry Hopkins in Moscow, said London sources, had found out that Stalin was worried, too. Stalin had gone all out for cooperation with capitalist countries; the build-up of Yalta and Dumbarton Oaks in Russia would make a shift embarrassing. The Russian people certainly did not want to contemplate the prospect of World War III. Maxim Litvinov, who represents those Communists who believe in cooperation with capitalist democracy, was pointedly brought from his obscurity to attend a Moscow dinner for Hopkins.

What Is Truth? But the official Russians were the weakest witnesses. Molotov in 1939 had said: "The present war . . . lays the foundation for a new bloody struggle which will involve the whole world. . . . The leaders of capitalism . . . betray the masses of their people by asserting that the aim of the war is the protection of democracy." Now he preached collaboration. The Ukrainian chairman in San Francisco, Dmitry Z. Manuilsky, had said in 1939: "Not a stone will remain of the cursed capitalist structure." Now he echoed Joseph Grew's statement that there were no basic conflicts between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

The Red Army's General Karatkov was asked in Copenhagen when Soviet troops were going to leave Denmark's Bornholm Island. He made the most conciliatory answer possible: their occupation would be "exactly as long as Marshal Stalin, President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill decide."

On the left, the opposition between those who believed in the "irrepressible conflict" and those who did not was creating rifts. In New York, the Nation's Louis Fischer resigned because he thought the magazine's policy too pro-Russian (see PRESS).

The Communist parties outside of Russia were in a dither which dampened collaborationist hopes. Jacques Duclos, secretary of the French Communist party, belabored Earl Browder for plumping for collaboration with capitalist democracy. This week the U.S. Communists' National Board abjectly confessed its "opportunist errors," abandoned the "illusion" that wartime collaboration could be continued.

Testimony from the Front. Somewhere in Europe, TIME Correspondent William Walton read U.S. news accounts which, to him, indicated a belief at home that "central Europe is tense with Russian-American animosity." These accounts prompted him to cable last week:

"In the past three weeks I have traveled over considerable portions of Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria watching our troops and the people they are governing. In Asch, Czechoslovakia, I saw truckloads of displaced Russian civilians starting out for repatriation, guided by G.I.s of the ist Division who vied for the job because they had so much fun behind the Russian lines with the hard-drinking Red Army soldiers.

"In Pilsen, smartly polished troops of our 2nd Infantry staged a review in the ancient city square for visiting Red dignitaries and soldiers who received American combat medals. Afterwards Reds and doughs with arms about one another's shoulders careened in jeeps through the Pilsen streets.

"Outside Munich's Gothic Rathaus, now the seat of the U.S. Military Government, I talked with a short, stocky corporal who told with relish how he had just returned from forbidden Vienna, where he had served with a liaison mission. That mission, he said, was carried out successfully in an atmosphere of trust and good will. And incidentally, he added that the Viennese seemed surprised but happy under Russian occupation, which so far has netted them a larger food ration than Austrians get in the American zone, and also a government chosen from their own people.

"These are but a few of the signs I have seen that American-Russian relations, though hampered by inadequate liaison, are on a relaxed and easy basis in this quarter of the globe.

"The U.S. Army is deployed through Central Europe for peace. If it were not for khaki and helmets, our troops would look like trippers rather than soldiers. What I have seen in Central Europe looks suspiciously like peace between America and Russia."

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